Monday, February 8, 2016

No Money, No Jobs, Big Problems - Learning 2.0

What is a college degree really worth? Over the past decade more and more of the media is erupting with the fact that there are no jobs for college graduates and being that it is 2016 and we love to blame everything on someone else we are finally turning toward the colleges themselves as the problem. But not all colleges are at risk, mostly just for-profit colleges and especially career based colleges. According to the article by usnews.com the new head of the education department, John King, is putting his focus on making sure students are getting educations that will pay off. And in his pursuit of getting to the bottom of things he found that many schools were charging more and more in order to receive more of students Federal Aid. Finding loopholes through veterans, and overall taking advantage of our government trying to supply citizens with an education.

The problem is that the education is not only overpriced but misrepresented. Schools across the nation are putting out deceitful numbers of students receiving jobs after they receive their degree in order to recruit more students. Some higher education facilities were caught paying their employees by the number of recruits they have like a commission. As the government looks to go after these colleges for settlements the sum of the settlements is in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile a former deputy secretary of the education department is taking over Apollo Education which is a giant for-profit organization in a huge $1.1 billion deal.

The real question boils down to is the government in the wrong? Is the school in the wrong? Or is society just wrong? And the answer is undetermined. The school is a business like any other and wants to make money. The government is doing its duty of protecting the people from a corrupt form of government, as in the governing of schools. And society just isn't interested in our education anymore for job placement. Schools aren't necessarily teaching the things we need to know to get a job so those with the most life experience and street smarts can take the job before someone who knows the pythagorean theorem because most jobs don't require that. The learning process isn't corrupt in the higher education but in the lower education as well as we have seen in past years with the fairly new common core learning epidemic. People can attribute this learning curve to social media, to bad parenting, to poor schooling, but really it is a societal effort that is ruining things because everything seemed to work much smoother in the past. Sure, there were some bumps along the way but at no point was it appearing that the job market had collapsed and college and university education was becoming obsolete.

http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-02-08/new-education-department-unit-to-take-aim-at-errant-for-profit-colleges

2 comments:

  1. Interesting post, As nice as it sounds to accept free college as mentioned in this article, I do believe that you get what you pay for, and that as soon as the government gets involved in a private institutions business it tends to get diluted down to something ineffective and of less value. I know that in Scotland their college is free, but it is very different then a college degree in the states and there are more trade type degrees. I do think that maybe the cash flow at a University should be reviewed Because I don't understand how college can be so expensive and I don't believe that teachers are getting paid what they should for there valuable services. I also think that Colleges should constantly be reviewing their degrees and how useful they are in society and possible be reshaping and molding them to meet the changing demands in the work field.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Thank you for your post! This was an interesting read and really relevant to us getting ready to graduate. I have a cousin who graduated with a masters in Iranian Politics, he breifly worked for the FBI pushing paper because the job he wanted just wasn't there. He was essentially doing admin work and his co-workers had little post-secondary education. He quit and has now taken his 6 figure student debt and teaches Cross-fit at a gym in D.C., something he definitely could have done without a day of college. I think the whole nation is feeling his same frustration as we enter a seemingly hopeless job market with debt and no "real experience."

    ReplyDelete